Everyone Deserves a Second Chance
by The Fifth Founder of Hogwarts
Summary: Harry didn't choose to return to Hogwarts on King's Cross. No he chose something much more different. After meeting with someone other than Dumbledore, he realises that the true place to go to is where he is needed most. There was no way of knowing that the place he was going was to the very front doorstep of the orphan home Tom Riddle Jr. resided in. Grey!Harry Super!Harry


A/N: Here we go, another fanfic, let's hope this one turns out well, mainly all I have to say is please review, fav and follow, it always means a lot. This fanfic is based on many different fanfics that I have read over the years and it would take a long time to list them so I won't be doing that but I'd like to thank everyone that has made a fanfic like this for inspiring me to make one as well. So without further ado, I present to you 'Everyone Deserves a Second Chance'.

**JK ROWLING OWNS EVERYTHING AND I CLAIM NONE OF IT TO BE MY OWN EXCEPT FOR ANY ORIGINAL CHARACTERS AND I RESEVE NO MONEY FROM THE CREATION OF THIS FANFIC.**

**IF YOU WANT TO, PLEASE IGNORE THE ITALICS FROM THE START OF THIS CHAPTER AS IT IS AN EXTRACT FROM 'HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS CHAPTER 35' **

**Chapter One**

_He lay face down, listening to the silence. He was perfectly alone. Nobody was watching. Nobody else  
>was there. He was not perfectly sure that he was there himself.<em>

_A long time later, or maybe no time at all, it came to him that he must exist, must be more than disembodied thought, because he was lying, definitely lying, on some surface. Therefore he had a sense of touch, and the thing against which he lay existed too._

_Almost as soon as he had reached this conclusion, Harry became conscious that he was naked. Convinced as he was of his total solitude, this did not concern him, but it did intrigue him slightly. He wondered whether, as he could feel, he would be able to see. In opening them, he discovered that he had eyes._

_He lay in a bright mist, though it was not like mist he had ever experienced before. His surroundings were not hidden by cloudyvapor; rather the cloudy vapor had not yet formed into surroundings. The floor on which he lay seemed to be white, neither warm nor cold, but simply there, a flat, blank something on which to be._

_He sat up. His body appeared unscathed. He touched his face. He was not wearing glasses anymore._

_Then a noise reached him through the unformed nothingness that surrounded him: the small soft thumpings of something that flapped, flailed, and struggled. It was a pitiful noise, yet also slightly indecent. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he was eavesdropping on something furtive, shameful._

_For the first time, he wished he were clothed._

_Barely had the wish formed in his head than robes appeared a short distance away. He took them and pulled them on. They were soft, clean, and warm. It was extraordinary how they had appeared just like that, the moment he had wanted them..._

_He stood up, looking around. Was he in some great Room of Requirement? The longer he looked, the more there was to see. A great domed glass roof glittered high above him in sunlight. Perhaps it was a palace. All was hushed and still, except for those odd thumping and whimpering noises coming from somewhere close by in the mist..._

_Harry turned slowly on the spot, and his surroundings seemed to invent themselves before his eyes. A wide-open space, bright and clean, a hall larger by far than the Great Hall, with that clear domed glass ceiling. It was quite empty. He was the only person there, except for ¨C He recoiled. He had spotted the thing that was making the noises. It had the form of a small, naked child, curled on the ground, its skin raw and rough, flayed-looking, and it lay shuddering under a seat where it had been left, unwanted, stuffed out of sight, struggling for breath._

_He was afraid of it. Small and fragile and wounded though it was, he did not want to approach it. Nevertheless he drew slowly nearer, ready to jump back at any moment. Soon he stood near enough to touch it, yet he could not bring himself to do it. He felt like a coward. He ought to comfort it, but it repulsed him._

_"You cannot help."_

Harry spun around to face a man he may have mistaken for Albus Dumbledore be it not for the staff the man held in his right hand. The man wore robes of dark grey and tints of white.

"Harry Potter." He spread his left hand out wide in a beckoning way to Harry. "You brave boy, no. You brave _man_. Come…come let us walk."

Harry was stunned, yet he followed the elder man away from the frail whimpering child lay, he lead Harry to two seats he had not noticed, set quite a distance away. The elder man with the help of his staff took place in one of them while Harry hesitantly fell into the other. Harry did not know why he was with this man, only that it was where he should be.

Looking up at the elderly man, Harry notices how truly similar to Dumbledore the man is. With a striking silver beard and twinkling blue eyes. Although these blue eyes did not reside behind any spectacles. He seemed so similar yet, not.

"You have many questions, I assume Harry. Do you not?" The elderly man questions.

"Who are you?" Harry replies

"Ah, a question I'm afraid I cannot answer, though there are many questions I can answer, ask again my dear boy, ask again." The elderly man says with a beaming smile gracing his wrinkled face.

Harry wonders for a minute, or was it a minute, this…place, surely did not feel like it had a time or place or even being. Was Harry even still in _being_.

"Am I dead?" He asks softly, not knowing what answer he is hoping for.

"Ah." The elderly man smiles even more broadly. "That is the question, isn't it? On the whole, dear boy, I think not."

They share a look for a few moments, the older man's smile getting wider by the second.

"I'm not dead?"

"No, my dear boy, I don't believe so."

"Then…then what am I" Harry instinctively raises his hand to his scar which seems not to be there "I should have died, I was ready. I let him kill me, to save them!" Harry says

"And that, my boy is exactly _why _you are here. You let him kill you, and though you know it already I will explain. The piece of his soul, that had once resided in you. _That _is what he killed."

"So…the part of his soul…the one that was in me. It's gone?"

"Yes my boy, yes! Your soul is wholly yours" The man once more beams

"But he used the killing curse, no one died for me this time. I cannot be alive." Harry states

"You know the answer, dear boy, just dig, think, think!"

And Harry thought. He let his gaze drift over his surroundings. It seemed familiar to him, almost as if he had been there before, but surely not at the same time. Then seemingly out of nowhere the answer to the question rose easily to his lips.

"He took my blood." Said Harry

"Precisley my boy" He smiles "He took your blood and used it to rebuild himself. Your blood is in _his _veins. Lily's protection is in his veins! And as such, he tethered you to life while he lives."

The whimpering child once more made noises causing Harry to look back at it.

"Are you sure there is nothing we ca-"

"My boy, there is nothing we can do, it is beyond help of any of us."

"Are you sure?"

"My boy, in this I am certain."

"Then, explain…more"

"You were the seventh Horcrux, Harry, the Horcrux he never meant to make. He had rendered his soul so unstable that it broke apart when he committed those acts of unspeakable evil, the murder of your parents, the attempted killing of a child. But what escaped from that room was even less than he knew. He left more than his body behind. He left part of himself latched to you, the would-be victim who had survived."

"And his knowledge remained woefully incomplete, Harry! That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children's tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. Nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped."

"He took your blood believing it would strengthen him. He took into his body a tiny part of the enchantment your mother laid upon you when she died for you. His body keeps her sacrifice alive, and while that enchantment survives, so do you and so does Voldemort's one last hope for himself."

Harry stared, a minute passed.

"But there's more, there's more. Why did my wand break the wand he borrowed?"

"My boy, even I cannot be certain as to that."

"Then guess. You knew all of that. Guess."

"What you must understand, Harry, is that you and Lord Voldemort have journeyed together into realms of magic hitherto unknown and untested. But here is what I think happened, and it is unprecedented, and no wandmaker could, I think, ever have predicted or explained it to Voldemort."

"Without meaning to, as you now know, Lord Voldemort doubled the bond between you when he returned to a human form. A part of his soul was still attached to yours, and, thinking to strengthen himself, he took a part of your mother's sacrifice into himself. If he could only have understood the precise and terrible power of that sacrifice, he would not, perhaps, have dared to touch your blood... But then, if he had been able to understand, he could not be Lord Voldemort, and might never have murdered at all."

"Having ensured this two-fold connection, having wrapped your destinies together more securely than ever two wizards were joined in history, Voldemort proceeded to attack you with a wand that shared a core with yours. And now something very strange happened, as we know. The cores reacted in a way that Lord Voldemort, who never knew that your wand was a twin of his, had ever expected."

"He was more afraid than you were that night, Harry. You had accepted, even embraced, the possibility of death, something Lord Voldemort has never been able to do. Your courage won, your wand overpowered his. And in doing so, something happened between those wands, something that echoed the relationship between their masters."

"I believe that your wand imbibed some of the power and qualities of Voldemort's wand that night, which is to say that it contained a little of Voldemort himself. So your wand recognized him when he pursued you, recognized a man who was both kin and mortal enemy, and it regurgitated some of his own magic against him, magic much more powerful than anything Lucius's wand had ever performed. Your wand now contained the power of your enormous courage and of Voldemort's own deadly skill: What chance did that poor stick of Lucius Malfoy's stand?"

"But, Hermione...she was able to break it. How?"

"My boy, magic is a complicated thing, it is hard to understand all of it, near impossible. But I believe that the remarkable power of the wand was only directed towards the man who had so severely connected himself to it. It was only directed at Voldemort."

Harry once more went silent, once more he let time pass by as he gazed at his surroundings in wonder. Where was he?

"Where are we?" Harry asks

"That, my boy is what I wondered to ask you. Where would you say we are?"

Harry had not known it before yet now it seemed liked the answer had been prepared for him at an earlier time.

"It looks like Kings Cross, but there are no trains that I can see."

"King's Cross Station!" The man chuckled "Good gracious really?"

"Well...where do _you _think we are?" Harry asks defensively

The man once more chuckles  
>"My boy, I meant no offence by my laughing, I myself have never seen King's Cross Station so who am I to judge and as for your second question. I do not know, for this place is yours and not mine."<p>

Harry understood none of his words. He was getting frustrated, too many questions were being answered too vaguely. Harry remained in such a state until he remembered a more pressing matter.

"The Deathly Hallows"

"You are master of them my boy, you did not fall for their trap, desperacy. You did not become desperate like many before you. Grindelwald. Voldemort. Dumbeledore."

"They all fell for the Hallows trap. A desperate man's dream."

"Dumbledore was a good man! He was nothing like Voldemort or Grindelwald...he didn't kill for it." Harry says defensively

"No, no. You are right, he did not kill like the others, yet he too seeked for a way to become master. He too fell desperate and of that there is no denying."

"He wasn't a desperate man. He was a good man! He sought to help and he didn't create horcruxes..." Harry shouts "He was a good man."

"Yes my boy, I am not denying that. No. Not at all. But it still holds true that he fell for their trap. Yes he was a good man, but ultimately, he fell and as such he will remain guilty for as long as he is."

"But he's dead. He isn't alive is he?" Harry asks with hope

Once more silence as the child whimpers once more. Yet this time Harry does not look.

"My boy, yes. He is dead. But so am I."

"So he can't be guilty and there is nothing he can be guilty for."

"He is guilty my boy. Guilty for his desperation, guilty for falling to the Hallows trap, guilty for taking the cloak that one fateful night yet unjustly guilty for that."

"He is guilty for his sister and for his brother and guilty for leaving them in aspiration for a desperate man's dream. He is guilty and will remain so until there is no more guilt to bathe in and no more guilt to give. Not because he is condemned to such but because he truly feels guilty and that is something neither me nor you can change."

"There's more, more questions to ask."

"My boy there will always be questions yet not always will there be time."

Harry went silent.

"But Snape? And Sirius and my parents? What about my questions about them?"

"Some questions are simply meant to be left. The answers will come in time. But now it is time to decide."

"I have to go back don't I."

"Yes...and no. The choice is yours to make."

"I have a choice?"

"Yes my boy, you have many, many choices, for if what you have said is true then you could perhaps board a train."

"Where would the train take me?"

"To the greatest journey of them all."

"Death?"

"My boy, not death, but a journey. One could call it death but for you it would be a journey, for you could just as well go back and forwards and on."

"What does that mean?"

"We are in a place of crossroads. There is no time here. No measure nor place. We are just here yet at the same time not. You could just as well drop yourself in the past as you could the present or the future."

"Voldemort has the elder wand."

"That is true. He does."

"So I must go, I must do my part."

"My boy, have you still not understood" He chuckles "You have fulfilled the prophecy. Neither can live while the other survives. Yes his soul is gone, his last horcrux is gone but the prophecy speaks not about that but about you and him, if you go back. He will survive. Or you will both die."

"But then...what should I do?"

"I am not here to tell you what to do, I am just here."

"If I don't go back, will Voldemort still die?"

"Neither can live while the other survives just means that neither can die while the other survives which goes to say, if you were to die, he would too."

"So I must go on, I have to go on to death?"

"Once more you are wrong. I mean this in no bitterness. If you leave for the past you will die in the present and if you leave for the future you will also die in the present. And if you leave to go on to death, you will die in the present as well."

"So I can go anywhere except back. Except back there?"

"You can go anywhere. Even back. But would that be the right decision."

Once more silence fills the room, deadly silence, not even the child whimpers.

"I know what I must do."

"Ah my boy, then my job here is done."

"One more thing, Is this real or is it just in my head?"

The man chuckled once more.

"Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on Earth should that mean it is not real?"

And with those final words, the man was gone.

Harry knew what he was to do, he knew what he should do, he knew what was to happen. And as such when the screeching whistling sound of the train came. And the train itself came in. Harry boarded with a smile on his face.

Harry was going not where he wanted to go, he didn't actually know where or when exactly he was going, he just knew that he was going to when and where he should be and even he didn't know the answer to where that was.

A/N: Okay, done. What did you think? Hope you liked it, drop a review, fav and follow if you want. Next chapter should be up quite soon.

The Fifth Founder of Hogwarts.


End file.
